Terry Pratchett Quotes

I believe it should be possible for someone stricken with a serious and ultimately fatal illness to choose to die peacefully with medical help, rather than suffer.

I'm trying to knock the medical profession into accepting its responsibilities, and those responsibilities include assisting their patients with death.

My father was in terrible pain towards the end because of his bed sores, and he did go into hospice, and I think that was better in some ways. You know, I think his death was peaceful, and it was all right. He was just in terrible pain.

Bodily discomfort and emotional fear and attachment make the dying uncomfortable and fearful. So, to help those dying people, I think modern medical science has a lot of facilities to reduce pain, or perhaps not to reduce pain, but not to experience pain.

Whereas a prolonged life is not necessarily better, a prolonged death is necessarily worse.

Hospice is such a tremendous thing. Patients seem to reach an inner peace.

Americans of all ages deserve quality end-of-life medical care.

The end of life is likely to be an important focus for innovation. Most people die in hospitals, tied up with tubes and with their bodies pumped full of drugs. Yet most would rather die at home and with more control over the timing and manner of their death.

We could keep his body going, but it was trying its hardest to die.

Hospice has brought such a light in my life. It is something I will be involved with until I need hospice myself.

Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.

Many, if not most, Americans can imagine a fate worse than death, and it is a seemingly interminable process of dying. For them, it is frightening that politicians can find ways to interject themselves into this sad process.

In the last stages of a final illness, we need only the absence of pain and the presence of family.

Around-the-clock support is crucial for children receiving palliative care. They and their families often need help every hour of every day, both in hospices and at home.

When I came to this country in 1958, to be a dying patient in a medical hospital was a nightmare. You were put in the last room, furthest away from the nurses' station. You were full of pain, but they wouldn't give you morphine. Nobody told you that you were full of cancer and that it was understandable that you had pain and needed medication.

If I had terminal cancer, I had a few weeks to live, I was in tremendous amount of pain - if they just effectively wanted to turn off the switch and legalise that by legalising euthanasia, I'd want that.

Patients who are being kept alive by technology and want to end their lives already have a recognized constitutional right to stop any and all medical interventions, from respirators to antibiotics. They do not need physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia.

I accept the dying process. I would just like to be as healthy as I possibly can at each step and phase along the way.

Yes, we need euthanasia, for certain cases where people are in comas or too immobile to even press a button.

Hospice means end-of-life care. The admission ticket is a diagnosis from a doctor that you have six months or less to live.

Incurably sick persons should be granted mercy death.

Wait for them to die

Unless they've had some experience with it, the hospice is still a mystery to most people. Because hospice deals with death, people tend not to talk about it.

My work as a doula also extends all the way to the end of life. I sit at the bedsides of people who are passing on in hospices or nursing homes, for the people and families who want that kind of thing.

The definition of what it means to be dying has changed radically. We are able to extend people's lives considerably, including sometimes, good days.